Constitution Takes Another Hit

One more Constitutional Right down the tubes, at least for women.
The Supreme Court's conservative majority upheld a nationwide ban Wednesday on a controversial abortion procedure in a decision that sets the stage for additional restrictions on a woman's right to choose.

"The 5-4 decision written by Justice Anthony Kennedy said the Partial Birth Abortion Ban Act that Congress passed and President Bush signed into law in 2003 does not violate a woman's constitutional right to an abortion."

The law is constitutional despite not containing an exception that would allow the procedure if needed to preserve a woman's health, Kennedy said. "The law need not give abortion doctors unfettered choice in the course of their medical practice," he wrote in the majority opinion.

"This ruling flies in the face of 30 years of Supreme Court precedent and the best interest of women's health and safety. ... This ruling tells women that politicians, not doctors, will make their health care decisions for them." She had argued that point before the justices. Said Eve Gardner of Planned Parenthood.

Reacting to the ruling, Bush said that it affirms the progress his administration has made to defend the "sanctity of life."

If that isn't the biggest bunch of bullshit I have heard! Bush cares about the sanctity of life? Since when?

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Marriage, Sexuality, Abortion Issues for Candidates

Is the Presidency really going to be determined by these issues?
Is the "Cultural War" real?
What the hell is going on in this Country?
Issues like should homosexuals be allowed to get married, abortion, and other "moral issues" appear to be of more concern then let's say Human Welfare, Poverty, Education, Civil Rights and Liberties, and the Economy.

Laura Flanders: To Beat the Right, Clinton and Obama Need to Be Clear About Supporting Gay Rights
By Laura Flanders, AlterNet

Democrats will keep getting attacked on sexuality, marriage and abortion for as long as they dodge the discussion. Read more »

The following explains this better than I ever could:

December 2000 & January 2001 TOC
FEATURES:Why There is a Culture War
By John Fonte

As intellectual historians have often had occasion to observe, there are times in a nation’s history when certain ideas are just "in the air." Admittedly, this point seems to fizzle when applied to our particular historical moment. On the surface of American politics, as many have had cause to mention, it appears that the main trends predicted over a decade ago in Francis Fukuyama’s "The End of History?" have come to pass — that ideological (if not partisan) strife has been muted; that there is a general consensus about the most important questions of the day (capitalism, not socialism; democracy, not authoritarianism); and that the contemporary controversies that do exist, while occasionally momentous, are essentially mundane, concerned with practical problem-solving (whether it is better to count ballots by hand or by machine) rather than with great principles.
And yet, I would argue, all that is true only on the surface. For simultaneously in the United States of the past few decades, recurring philosophical concepts have not only remained "in the air," but have proved influential, at times decisive, in cultural and legal and moral arguments about the most important questions facing the nation. Indeed: Prosaic appearances to the contrary, beneath the surface of American politics an intense ideological struggle is being waged between two competing worldviews.
Far from being content with a mere uprising, therefore, Gramsci believed that it was necessary first to delegitimize the dominant belief systems of the predominant groups and to create a "counter-hegemony" (i.e., a new system of values for the subordinate groups) before the marginalized could be empowered. Moreover, because hegemonic values permeate all spheres of civil society -- schools, churches, the media, voluntary associations -- civil society itself, he argued, is the great battleground in the struggle for hegemony, the "war of position." From this point, too, followed a corollary for which Gramsci should be known (and which is echoed in the feminist slogan) — that all life is "political." Thus, private life, the work place, religion, philosophy, art, and literature, and civil society, in general, are contested battlegrounds in the struggle to achieve societal transformation.

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